


Captain Miller's Tale

by cruisedirector



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Alternate Reality, Amnesia, Drinking, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Episode: s04e18-19 The Killing Game, F/M, False Identity, France (Country), Français | French, Holodeck, Loyalty, Making Love, Maquis, Memory Loss, Mind Control, Misunderstandings, Nazis, Period-Typical Sexism, Romance, Science, Tattoos, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-12-21
Updated: 2000-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 22:32:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruisedirector/pseuds/cruisedirector
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An alternate universe take on "The Killing Game," or what might have happened if first-season Janeway and Chakotay stumbled into a fourth-season episode.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Captain Miller's Tale

**Author's Note:**

> This story is for Deborah, of course, and also for Leslie, August, and various members of JetC13. I tried to make L.R. Bowen write it for me so I wouldn't have to do it; she wrote her own version, which is as usual terrific.

She looked familiar from the moment her face emerged from the tunnel, so he knew to hold his fire even before the dark man lowered his weapon and greeted her: "Catrine." The leader of the local Resistance - Captain Miller had heard of her, had been briefed about her, but nobody had had a photograph of her so the shock of recognition was odd...as if there were more to it than he could remember. Secret bunkers, now secret tunnels, he didn't like it one bit, any more than he liked her obvious familiarity with the strange technology--what did she know, and why hadn't she relayed that information to the Allies? But her eyes met his as she crawled out, and he knew he could trust her.

That she was a beautiful woman shouldn't have surprised him; she was a nightclub owner, after all. She just wasn't what he pictured in a freedom fighter. The scrappy dark woman, Bobby's past love, was more what he'd expected. He got the feeling that the colored bartender didn't trust the other one, the brassy blonde who was glaring at them all. Miller could see why: that one seemed a little too Aryan, and a little too rigid. Like the Nazis. Not like the girls of St. Clair, like Bobby's old flame - hardly a knockout, but nothing to sneeze at either, big brown eyes and a warm sassy smile. Bobby had said the girls of St. Clair were all great in bed, but Brigitte was the only one he really fell for. Must have felt like a kick in the guts to see her knocked up with a Kraut baby...although she probably wasn't the only woman who'd put out for the Nazis to protect her own. Miller glanced at Catrine again, at her guarded expression, and wondered how far her resistance went when it came to defending St. Clair.

He liked her people. The bartender was unerringly logical - Miller approved of the man's analysis of the bunker and the superweapon the Nazis were likely building in there. An escapee from Rommel, maybe, or an African who'd moved to France before the war? He didn't seem French. Miller knew Bobby was glad to see the tough brunette, and the blonde singer seemed to know her explosives. Catrine was the enigma.

No way was he letting her get back into that tunnel alone. Partly because he thought she might need his help, even if she was local and didn't need protection; partly because he could tell she'd seen more than she was saying. How could she have recognized those superweapons? He'd read some theories about new warheads carrying high-yield explosives and power from harnessing the atom, but nothing which would make him think the Germans had developed a set of bombs so powerful that an Allied air strike could set off explosions that would destroy an entire valley. Catrine's statement made him vaguely suspicious, not of her exactly, but of the whole situation. Maybe she was just trying to protect her town from Allied bombs as well as German occupation, or maybe she had her own agenda. There was too much stuff he knew nothing about, mysterious bunkers, mysterious tunnels, mysterious beautiful French women who risked their lives to defend their country.

When she cocked her head at him, he followed her in.

Miller had no choice but to let Catrine lead in the tunnels; she knew where she was going, and besides, these weren't like any tunnels he'd seen before. Strange technology embedded in the walls, with neon strips glowing and brightly lit panels that looked like airplane controls. The view from behind was nice, anyway. She never hesitated, her movements sure and steady as she crawled without hesitation around corners, up a ladder.

"You're a pretty gung-ho kind of gal, aren't you?" he asked her, partly to make conversation, partly to see whether or not she thought it was a compliment. His mother wouldn't have thought so, but the women he knew in the war effort back home were pretty gung-ho themselves.

"Does that bother you?"

She didn't sound bothered, herself. "Nope." Then by way of excuse, he told her he wasn't used to it, because he was a little afraid to tell her he always liked the gung-ho ones. She reminded him of...well, himself, in her determination to protect her people, but of someone else too, someone he had known once, whose name kept slipping his mind right as he was about to get a handle on it. He wished he could remember, because he didn't like the idea that he could have known a woman like her once and let her slip away.

She stopped him at the end of a corridor just before they reached what looked like an access hatch, to warn him about the caves they were about to enter and the folk who lived there. He thought he was ready for anything, but he wasn't prepared to find mutants living in the caves - that was what those people had to be, no amount of surgery or tattoos could explain the misshapen heads and body markings. He'd gotten his own tattoo under strange enough circumstances, just before he shipped out-- his men had put him up to it and suggested he get some curvy woman on his arm, but the Indian who owned the place had looked him up and down till he got the creeps and then told him an ancient legend about people from outer space settling in America. He'd wound up with the strange tribal mark on his forehead before he quite knew what had happened. It marked him as different, but for some reason it felt special. Truth be told, he liked it.

Women did, too. He caught Catrine glancing at it when he took her hand to help her down from the rocks where she'd climbed to talk to the drunken mutants, who'd thrown him a skein of the worst-smelling whiskey he'd ever encountered. She seemed familiar with the stuff, but then, she ran a nightclub. Who knew what sorts of people she'd had to cater to? Again he wondered who she'd had to cooperate with, and how far she'd had to go. He was willing to bet that she'd do just about anything to protect her people. He didn't know whether to admire that or be a little sick about it.

He also didn't know how to feel about how much she obviously knew about the war, when he was so ignorant. Those mutants - there had been reports of things the Nazi doctors tried on their own soldiers, but Miller hadn't thought there had been time to develop a whole race of warriors like these, and if Catrine was comfortable with them and could communicate with them, they must have been around for awhile. It was disturbing to realize that someone on his own side might have been tampering with people like that. Was Catrine some sort of secret scientist? That would explain how she knew how to use all the equipment, and why she knew about the mutants, and the superweapons. But if she was a scientist, what was she doing in the Resistance in St. Clair, instead of working for the underground in Paris? Maybe St. Clair was somehow central to the Nazi superweapon effort. Or maybe she just loved St. Clair.

Obviously Catrine was a diplomat as well as a scientist if she'd managed to wring enough information of out the Nazis in her club to realize she needed to expose the bunker. She finished talking to the man in the strange uniform who had appeared out of nowhere and walked back, covering her mouth to stifle a yawn. He hadn't slept in over twenty-four hours and he was willing to bet she hadn't either. "They aren't going to finish that bunker overnight," he said when she was within earshot.

"What are you suggesting?"

"We should rest."

"You rest if you need to. I'm going ahead with these plans."

"Are you going to tell me exactly what these plans are?" he asked pointedly.

Catrine took a long look at him, wary and prepared to fight, but a loud guffaw arose from the mutant warriors, followed by an enormous belch which made them grin at one another instead. "All right. Let's rest for a few minutes," she agreed. Her arm rose to rub her shoulder. He waited until she had dropped her pack and started to rest against a rock before he circled behind her, pushing her hair off her neck.

She froze as he began to knead her shoulders, massaging the tight muscles of her back, and it hit him that she wasn't some girl from back home who expected him to court her, put on a show for her and then beg for what he knew they both wanted but she wasn't supposed to give him. French women weren't like that. They were supposedly looser, they'd never had Prohibition, they were probably used to saying yes or no based only on what they felt like doing. Again he remembered what Bobby had said about the girls of St. Clair, again he wondered how much this woman had done to defend his own side, how much it had cost her, what she really wanted.

Catrine tensed, then relaxed unexpectedly, letting her head fall forward so that her hair once again fell across her neck and his hands. As he swept it up and over her shoulder, she murmured something in French, something that sounded like "chaque au teint."

Everyone of the color? Each with the complexion? His French wasn't too good, although he'd had no problem understanding the bartender and the other civilians he'd worked with. All from the same background, maybe? Or was it supposed to mean that he and she were cut from the same cloth?

He turned her toward him, and was startled to see tears in her eyes. He'd thought of her as focused on her job, not wasting time sweating about the people under her, but maybe she was hurting for those she'd lost, and those she was about to lose. The Americans would clean the Nazis out of St. Clair, give her city back to her...and then what? With what she knew, what she'd seen, she wasn't going to be able to go back to being a nightclub owner. "Leave the war outside," the colored man had said was her motto to customers. Catrine was even more complicated than he'd thought.

"Sorry," she whispered. "Commander...Captain." He blinked at her slip. Confusion over the American title, or was she remembering someone else? A German? But she was looking right at him, her intense blue gaze cutting right through him. Again the chill of recognition, the sense that he wasn't remembering something important. He put his finger under her chin, turned her face up to his. Watched as her eyes flickered over his hair, his tattoo, his mouth. Involuntarily he had leaned closer to her, breathing her in, she smelled like a woman, traces of perfume and soap, she inhaled sharply as his face drew level with hers.

He hadn't meant to kiss her, but as he did it he realized that the possibility had been in his mind since he first laid eyes on her. There was something ironic about it, Maquis leader and Allied Captain, but the attraction had been instantaneous, and he couldn't keep his mind off it. Bad idea, to get into this state in the middle of a war, but it had also kept him focused--he forgot how tired he was, her mission became his mission. And now they were one and the same.

God she smelled good, even through the smoke from the mutants' campfire. And she tasted good too, a faint stickiness where what was left of her lipstick rubbed off on him as her mouth opened for him. He was surprised at the ardor of her response. One arm around his neck, holding him tightly to her, the other gripping his forearm. Her chest thrust forward against his, fingers barely grazing his hair. When his mouth slid away from hers to taste the skin of her throat, she murmured the French phrase again: "Chaque autre."

Like every other? Was she saying he was acting just like every man? Or did she mean they were meant for each other?

He remembered another foreign phrase: carpe diem. No time like the present, that was the American equivalent. There might never be another chance. Tomorrow they might both be dead. Whether their cause succeeded or failed, whatever happened in the morning, they were together now, tonight. For relief, for pleasure, for whatever they could find. Except that he didn't want this just to be another wartime fling. "Catrine..." he started to tell her. "This isn't how I'd want...not one night in the trenches..."

Her fingers found his and linked through them, clasped palm to palm, and for a moment he almost remembered. Why she was familiar. What was real and what was illusion. She shifted back to look into his eyes, though hers were still filled with tears. One finger from her other hand came up to press his mouth into silence. She knew what he was trying to say, didn't want to let him say it, because she knew. This was it, their one chance. As she let her finger fall from his lips, he nodded, "Yes, ma'am," just to make sure she understood.

"Captain," she admonished, and kissed him again. Hand on his chest, bending him backwards with her body. He tugged his fingers free from hers so he could get both his arms around her. They made love on top of his jacket on the cold ground, clinging to one another for warmth, for protection, and for affirmation of something he couldn't name. Bobby had been right about French women liking things you couldn't even pay most American girls to try, but that wasn't what made it the greatest experience he'd ever had. Catrine touched him as though she knew his body, and he found that he knew her too--not like they had actually been lovers before, but as if he'd loved her from afar, watched and fantasized and dreamed of her body, imagined what it would be like. A wish fulfilled. When she came, she gasped once more the French phrase whose meaning had been eluding him, and although he still didn't know what it meant, he did know what it referred to. Himself. That was all that mattered.

Afterwards she was very quiet, though she had cried out so loudly that the mutants had woken and guffawed and shouted at them to keep it down. He tried to hold her, but she kept pulling back. It didn't surprise him exactly - for some reason that, too, was familiar, even expected. But he finally asked her whether anything was wrong.

"I should never have gotten involved," she whispered.

"You mean in the Resistance?"

Catrine looked at him sharply. "With you. With anyone, while I have this much to accomplish." She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. "I can't afford to be afraid of losing one person."

The vehemence of her words moved him. "Well, I intend to survive," he said as offhandedly as possible. "And I'll come back to St. Clair, after the Nazis are gone and I get my men out safely. You won't lose me."

"You'll forget me." Her voice had a bleak finality. "You'll forget me when this mission is accompished. After the bomb goes off."

Something happened when she mentioned the bomb. Not that he didn't trust her, but it made him realize that there was a big piece she wasn't telling him, even bigger than the superweapons or the mutants. How had she known about what was inside the bunker? How did she know how to navigate the secret tunnels, and about all the experiments they were witnessing? It wasn't just technological secrets she was keeping from him: she was keeping her own, too. Who she really was. What she really wanted. For a moment he almost got angry.

Her mission was his mission. That was what he had decided, wasn't it?

"Maybe you were right before about getting done quickly," he said. "So it will be over. We'll need a few days to put things back together here and do recon once the bunker blows. We'll have more time to rest then, and we can talk." Her look was grateful.

"I think that once you get inside the bunker, a lot of things will become clear. Have you got the explosives?" He showed them to her. Without another word, she took his hand and led him back towards the tunnels full of all the materials he didn't recognize. Panels made of something stronger than glass, metals thinner and tougher than any he'd ever seen before. There was something strangely familiar about them, too. Something which he was shown once and then ordered to forget? He didn't have answers, and stuck with what he did know: putting together the timer for her bomb. He took orders well. He'd always been told that, it was one of the reasons he'd made captain.

"Will you tell me what we're blowing up?" he asked.

"If I told you we were blowing up a relay terminal controlling neural implants using nanoprobe technology, would it mean anything to you?"

"Nope." Silence. "You must think I'm awfully dumb," he burst out. "All this equipment that I don't know how to use. And all these secrets we didn't know were going on."

She shook her head in the negative. "Captain, until yesterday I had no idea what was going on. No idea. If Mademoiselle de Neuf hadn't forced me to see what was really at stake, the Nazis might have controlled this entire region. Now that I do know, you must believe me when I tell you that you and I are fighting for the same things, and failure could mean the end of the world."

They had reached the end of the corridor she'd been leading him down, and emerged into what looked like a laboratory. Huge instruments with more controls than a plane, screens showing graphs that changed constantly. Bright overhead light, translucent walls that were harder than any material he'd ever touched before. There was one Nazi inside; Miller took the guy out. More coming, though, so he went out into the corridor while Catrine ran her hands over controls of a type he didn't recognize. Whatever this place was, she was an expert on it. He was glad she was on his side.

A blast from one of the Nazi rifles, then a rumble. The soldiers burst past him, he heard sounds of battle within. His last coherent thought was of Catrine, praying that she would be all right--hoping that after the war he could stay in France for awhile with her, tell her about his home in Indiana, ask her whether she'd like to see it with him. Another image burst into his head, Catrine yet not Catrine, wearing a different uniform, fighting at his side. Kathryn. The name escaped his lips as the two of her merged, just as the two of him merged, himself and the other man with the tattoo, chaque autre, the name she'd been calling him, the name she had made his. Then Captain Miller died.

* * * *

When Chakotay came to, he was in the corridor outside sickbay with dead Hirogen all around him. He was mystified as to how he had gotten there...the last thing he remembered, he had been fighting to defend the bridge, standing with a rifle by the lift while Janeway studied a console, attempting to determine why the Hirogen were surrounding the holodeck.

Janeway. Kathryn. He could sense her everywhere, although he couldn't see her--he could smell her presence, sharp and sweet. Had he carried her to the medical labs? Was she injured? Inside sickbay, he found blood by the shattered console...hers, but not enough to suggest a fatal injury. He knew she must have fled before that explosion, probably back to the holodeck to defend their people. And he knew he had to find her.

Later, when the captain and Ensign Kim had destroyed the holoemitters, Chakotay tracked her down back in Sickbay. Wounded, she seemed slightly more distant than usual, not quite meeting his eyes. She told him "Captain Miller" had been most helpful to her, thanking him with a glassy smile. He knew that there was something he wasn't remembering, some information she had failed to relay in the official report--she was keeping a secret, something she had decided it was best if he didn't know. For a moment he almost got angry.

Her mission was his mission. That was what he had decided, wasn't it?

Chakotay chose to trust her enough not to ask any questions. Kathryn was pretty gung-ho when she was protecting her people, and they were cut from the same cloth.

**Author's Note:**

> I started to write a sequel to this story but I couldn't bear to finish it. It's called ["Suspended Animation"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/57479).


End file.
